ABSTRACT
When approaching the shores of the United States, Freud famously told Jung and Ferenczi: “They don’t know that we’re bringing them the plague.” It is a truism to say that psychoanalysis was a transformative cultural force in the twentieth century. After initial resistance, the United States came to embrace psychoanalysis as the lingua franca through which the educated middle classes might understand their lives. Psychoanalytic language pervaded everything from courtrooms to psychiatric hospitals. At mid-century, psychoanalysis still held most of the power positions in American psychiatry.
